Modern corporate enterprises have large volumes of critical data, such as work documents, emails, financial records, etc., that requires backup and recovery to prevent data loss. During backup procedure, data stored on client workstations and servers is sent to a backup storage. During recovery procedure, backup data is retrieved from the backup storage and reconstructed on client workstations and servers. Since the amount of data that requires backup can be very large, which is even for a medium-size company can be measured in hundreds of terabytes, the backup process can be very resource intensive and time consuming. Furthermore, provided that data backup has to be performed frequently, e.g., daily, semi-weekly, the backup process can be quite onerous on the corporate network.
In addition to backup traffic, there are many other types of data transmissions on typical corporate networks, such as emails, which may include large attachments, web browsing traffic, VoIP calls, audio/video streaming, administrative traffic, etc. (which will be commonly referred herein as non-backup traffic). If a lot of traffic passes at the same time on the network, the network bandwidth may be come insufficient to support all this traffic, and the data packets will be queued by network routers. In this case, data packets may be received at its destination with delay (or even lost). For some services, delays are not acceptable (such as VoIP, video/audio streaming, etc.). And, delays caused by large volume of backup traffic may significantly affect the quality of these and other time-sensitive transmissions on the network.
Therefore, there is a need to differentiate data backup and recovery traffic from other types of traffic to improve data throughput and overall efficiency of a corporate network.